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VICTORIA — Once again Premier Christy Clark was the most polished of the four party leaders. As with the earlier radio debate, Monday’s televised debate showed her superior skills as a communicator, honed in the broadcast medium.

She also came well prepared for the tough question off the top about her ill-advised decision to stop and go through a red light with her son and a Vancouver Sun reporter in the car. “There is no answer other than to say I was wrong to do it.”

If only that had been her initial response after the story was published Saturday in The Sun. Instead she gave it the brush-off — “it was 5:10 in the morning” — as she has often done when first confronted with one of the many embarrassments in her administration.

She got off a good shot at Conservative leader John Cummins for his Google-challenged screening of candidates. But other than that, if she had anything new to say about the Liberal plans for a fourth term, it didn’t show up on my notes.

And as the 90 minutes unfolded question by question and exchange by exchange, one was reminded of just how much baggage both Clark and the B.C. Liberal party are packing into this provincial campaign.

Adrian Dix, no slouch with an attack question, nailed the problem early on when he brought up the B.C. Liberals’ credibility-shattering experience with the harmonized sales tax.

Four years of fiscal policy wasted on a tax that was foisted on the electorate without warning, 10 weeks after an election campaign in which it was barely mentioned and then only as something that was not on the radar screen.

“Why,” he asked, should the Liberal government “be rewarded for this policy failure?”

Conservative Leader John Cummins piled onto the premier as well, chronicling the Liberal record of debt, deficits, spending and the claim to have already balanced the budget, a mere four weeks into the current fiscal year.

Dix came back at her for the $16-million advertising campaign touting a job creation plan that was modestly successful if you accept her numbers, a failure if you accept his. The debt-free government was actually increasing the debt, the government that promised to keep taxes low had just raised them, and so on.

It was all “a little rich” to be accused of inconsistency by such a government, he lamented at one point.

As for his own weaknesses, I thought Dix had a stronger answer to the accusation that he was becoming the “Dr. No” to proposals for economic development, particularly in the resource sector.

He cited his support for forestry, mining, skills training, tourism, the film industry and the development of liquefied natural gas, which may come as a bit of a shock to some of the more doctrinaire environmentalists among his supporters.

But I thought his best answer was on the perennial tough question for him, namely the notorious memo to file, the one he backdated to try and protect himself and his boss Glen Clark during a scandal over casino licensing.

“I take responsibility,” he said. And for emphasis, he said it four times. Enough there for the voters to judge, surely.

The other leaders? Jane Sterk had a good radio debate but was given a smaller role in the TV, in part because the other leaders did not pitch her many questions when they were given the opportunity.

There was more focus on Cummins. And in his workmanlike way, he spoke for a still significant group of disaffected British Columbians — many of them in rural communities — who feel unfairly treated by the carbon tax, by promising to abolish same.

Less persuasive was his answer when asked how he would make up the estimated loss of revenue, some $1.2 billion. Any group of fiscal Conservatives worth their salt could cut that out of a $46-billion provincial budget, he claimed.

He may have had the most telling comment of the night, however, with his devastating observation off the top that “nobody” expects Christy Clark and the Liberals to win the election and folks probably tuned in “to see what Adrian Dix would look like as a premier.”

If so, then what they saw was a leader who remains a bit awkward and evasive here and there, but who is a master of his chosen material, with growing confidence overall.

If any of the other leaders laid a glove on him in Monday night’s debate, it didn’t show up in my notes.

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